Subj : A Terminal and a Manual
To   : hyde david
From : Kai Richter
Date : Wed Oct 16 2019 13:02:34

Hello hyde!

15 Oct 19, hyde david wrote to All:

 hd> Atari 800) and it came with a thick manual. That's all you had, a
 hd> computer, a manual and a terminal prompt. It was a world of
 hd> exploration and discovery.

Welcome back in the world of exploration, discovery and frustration. ;)

 hd> So my question is this. Does any one have a suggestion of a book that
 hd> will provide the same experience in learning to use Debian Linux?

No. Especially for Debian there is no actual complete manual. Many Tutorials 
for the core system are outdated because of the change of the init system from 
sysv to systemd. There is technical progress in other tools too. I'm fighting 
with the change from "ifconfig" to "ip". My knowledge with ifconfig is useless 
and i've to start as newbee with "ip" again (dislike).

I started my linux experiences with a study of the FHS, the filesystem 
hierarchy standard (see Wikipedia). It helped a lot to understand the basic 
structure of the system, where to look for which files.

In the past i used openbooks of o'reily but the actually published ones are not 
what i've seen in the past. For germans i recommend the openbooks of 
rheinwerk-verlag.de/openbook there are unix and linux books. To find the old 
o'reilly book you can use archive.org and search for oreilly.com/openbook/ and 
go to the timeline of feb 2004 where you can find the openbook "Learning 
Debian/GNU Linux". The content is outdated in details but you can see that the 
book structure is very same as some docs you'll find if you go to the 
documentation section of debian.org.

The entry point is debian.org/doc/index.en.html Take your time with the 
Administrator's Handbook and the Debian Reference.

The Atari 800 came with it's operating system on ROM, read only, it was static 
with no changes. Actual operating systems are not static that's why you should 
use a dynamic manual too.

The linux from scratch is a more detailed way to learn system administration 
from the very beginning. You could build your own specific system environment 
that way.

My main tools on the system shell are "apropos", "man", "find", "grep" and 
"nano". If you liked DOS and NC then there is a clone called midnight commander 
or short "mc" that can be installed with "apt install mc".

Regards

Kai

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